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Weekend Reading: Olympic-Fever Edition

This is quite a weekend: the Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and the kickoff of the Olympics. (Alas, plans for a ProfHacker medal pool fell by the wayside.) You may well need respite from all the forced merriment, or even just a break from grading or writing or meetings, so, as always, here are 5 links and a video for your delectation.

Anne-Marie Deitering (The Info-Fetishist) has an outstanding post about the challenges involved in building tutorials that lots of people will find useful: Not that teachers don’t want to borrow and adapt and take advantage of other people’s cool ideas and good work, but to really feel comfortable going into a classroom and teaching a group of students something, a lot of us need to feel like we’ve made the stuff we’re teaching ours. And the only way to do that is to adapt, and reshape, and refine.

Melanie McBride thinks about World of Warcraft from a critical-pedagogy perspective: Right now, the focus seems to be on the architecture of these spaces in relation to specific learning objectives and assessment. This quite distinct from the use of these spaces first as a place of inquiry. To reveal that this space may well be a hell of inequity doesn’t negate it as a learning space – if anything, it might offer the richest avenue into cultural and ideological inquiry we have available. And that inquiry and play can coexist.

Sidney Eve Matrix examines why people would buy and sell Twitter followers on eBay: It may be the crudest of all metrics for measuring someone’s contributions, thought leadership, potential, influence, or expertise. That does not mean many folks aren’t playing the numbers game, including HR recruiters, and in a glance economy, when there is a surplus of talent, information, and options on the table, your “digits” may be the only numbers that matter in personal branding.

Sarah Glassmeyer offers thoughts on “Libpunk Mentorship“: It should not have been, but this was an amazing revelation to me. It had honestly never occurred to me that I could tell a faculty member “No.” Or say “no” to the offer of a professional opportunity. Or otherwise do anything that didn’t put myself and my well being (physical and mental) last. (via Jessamyn West)

David Allen argues that information overload isn’t a problem: An old maxim: if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do. What they should have added is “…and everything coming at you will seem unclear, overwhelming, and a pain in the ass.”

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Amy Cavender is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and Associate Professor of Political Science and interim Director of the Center for Academic Innovation at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana.